I Named a Product "DecisionPoint." It Didn't Help Anyone Decide Anything.

In the two previous analytics software companies I founded, the job was the same: get the right information to the people who needed it.

Blue Edge Software, later acquired by SAP BusinessObjects, was about personalized information distribution over the web, back when that was a genuinely new idea. Antivia, acquired by insightsoftware, took the same instinct and built personalized BI apps for business users.

The product we built at Antivia was called DecisionPoint, a name I came up with and was quite proud of at the time. Looking back, it might be the least accurate product name I've ever put my name to.

DecisionPoint gave business users a personalized view of their own line of business. It was easy to use. People could get in, see what they needed, and get back to their job.

What it didn't do, if I'm honest, was help anyone make a better decision. It just showed them, faster, where things were already going wrong.

I've thought about that a lot since. It wasn't the dashboard, the app, or the personalized view. Those were fine. The real problem was that showing someone a number and helping them decide what to do about it are two different jobs. DecisionPoint and every other BI tool since were only ever built for the first one.

What it actually means

That second job has a name now: Decision Intelligence. Almost nobody explains it well.

Search for it and you'll find a dozen vendors bolting a chatbot onto a dashboard and calling it a rebrand. It isn't that, and it isn't a replacement for your BI stack either, so you can relax on that front.

The real idea is narrower and more useful than the marketing suggests. It's the layer that sits above your dashboards and closes the distance between a number changing on a screen and someone knowing what to do about it. DecisionPoint, ambitious as it was, never got there. Most tools still don't.

Three questions, not more charts

Every real decision comes down to the same three questions:

• What changed?
• Why did it change?
• What should we do next?

Dashboards are good at the first one. Most BI tools stop there. The why and the what next still land on someone's desk, usually a finance or ops leader, who has to go dig through the ERP or corner an analyst to get a straight answer.

That's the part worth thirty minutes of your time.

What we're actually covering

Paul Sutton, my co-founder, and I are running a live session on this on August 27, 4:00 to 4:30 PM BST. Here's what we'll cover:

• What Decision Intelligence actually is, in plain English
• Why more dashboards alone were never going to solve this, no matter how good they got
• The three questions every decision depends on
• How to tell genuine Decision Intelligence from a dashboard with AI bolted on
• A short, live example on a real finance scenario

You'll leave able to explain the term to your own team, and spot the real thing from the hype version without needing us in the room.

Worth the thirty minutes

You already know your dashboards look good. Whether anyone can act faster because of them is a different question, and it's the one that matters.

I named a product DecisionPoint because I believed a good enough view of the data would get people there on its own. It got most of the way, not all of it. If you want to see what actually closes that last stretch, join us live on August 27.

Register for "What is Decision Intelligence?"

Thursday, August 27. 4:00 to 4:30 PM BST. Thirty minutes, straight talking, time for your questions at the end.